Chapter 2: The Escape Attempt
The bathroom lie burned in my throat, a childish fiction that somehow worked. Mark’s concerned gaze followed me as I wobbled into the crowd, my new center of gravity a treacherous, swaying pendulum. Each step was a calculation. The knee-high boots, once stylish props, were now instruments of torture, the heels threatening to twist with every uneven patch of ground. My smaller feet, crammed into the pointed toes, screamed with a pain that was both distant and immediate.
The miniskirt, barely more than a wide belt, rode up with a will of its own, the fishnet stockings scraping like coarse sandpaper against the back of my thighs. The most persistent, shocking awareness was the thong—a relentless, intimate wedge of lace that defined a cleft that was now, horrifyingly, mine. Every shift of my hips, every clench of a muscle I couldn’t properly name, registered with a specificity that short-circuited my thoughts.
And then there was the jiggle.
It was a constant, mocking undertone to every movement. A heavy, pendulous bounce from my chest with each hurried step, constrained and amplified by the push-up bra’s ruthless architecture. A separate, softer sway from my rear, the skirt offering no containment. The combined effect was a nausea-inducing roll that had nothing to do with the alcohol Sabrina had consumed. I held my arms awkwardly, trying to stabilize the tumult on my torso, feeling the intricate, inked patterns shift over unfamiliar muscles and bones.
I pushed past a row of sweating port-a-potties, the stench cutting through the perfume of my own vanilla-scented sweat. The world behind the stage was a dystopian playground: skeletal lighting rigs, snaking cables that threatened to trip my unsteady feet, and the grumble of a diesel generator swallowing the distant music. My pink hair stuck to the damp skin of my neck and cheeks.
Then I saw him. Me.
My own body—Justin’s body—was leaning against a chain-link fence, gripping it with white-knuckled intensity. The posture was all wrong. Not my usual slouch, but a rigid, alert stance. The hands on the fence weren’t nervously tapping; they were spread, assessing their own strength.
“Justin!” The name ripped from Sabrina’s throat, her higher register cracking with panic.
The head—my head—snapped around. My own blue eyes, magnified behind the lenses of my glasses, locked onto me. Seeing my own face from the outside was a special kind of psychological car crash. The expression there wasn’t mine. It was a mask of focused, calculating horror, the jaw tight beneath the scruffy beard.
“Sabrina?” The voice was my voice, but the inflection was off. Flatter. More assessing.
I stumbled closer, my boots catching on a cable. I pitched forward, my hands flying out. The movement sent a sickening, beautiful wave through my chest. I caught myself on a cold metal equipment case. “It’s me. Justin. In here.”
She—he—it pushed off the fence. My long legs closed the distance in two strides. “No shit,” my voice said, low and tense. “What the fuck was that flash? Did you see it?”
“I saw it. I felt it.” I was breathing hard, each breath a reminder of the lungs expanding beneath the weight on my chest. The cool metal of my lip stud tapped against my teeth. “We… we swapped.”
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped my own mouth. “You’re a genius. Figured that out all by yourself?” Sabrina was in there, alright. The sarcasm, the edge. She looked down at Justin’s hands, turning them over. “This is so weird. Your eyesight is terrible. And I feel… slow. Heavy. But strong.” She flexed an arm, watching the tendon move under the skin with a fascination that made my stomach turn.
“We have to fix this,” I hissed, trying to keep my voice down. The sound of it, her flirty rasp used for utter despair, was maddening. “We have to find out what happened. Go back to where we were standing, maybe—”
“And do what?” she interrupted, cutting my logic off at the knees. “Wave our hands and hope for another magic lightning bolt? Look at us.” She gestured between us. “Mark is my husband. Chloe is your wife. They just saw us spacing out. If we go back there babbling about body swaps, they’ll think we’re having a shared psychotic break from bad molly. We’ll end up in the back of an ambulance.”
The practicality of it, stated in my own voice, was a cold slap. She was right. The evidence was our bodies. No one would believe the truth.
“So what’s your brilliant plan?” I whispered. The intoxication was a fog, but beneath it, a raw, analytical terror was crystallizing.
Sabrina-in-my-body ran a hand through Justin’s short hair—a gesture I never made. It looked restless, aggressive. “We have to be each other. Just for now. Just until we’re away from here and can think. You go back to Mark. I go back to Chloe. We act normal. We get through the night.”
The proposition was obscene. “I can’t… He touches you. He touches this body.”
Her eyes—my eyes—narrowed. “And Chloe touches you. She’s going to want to hold your hand, put her arm around you. You think I want that? You think I want to smell her perfume on my—on your skin?” She shuddered, a full-body motion that looked strange on my frame. “We don’t have a choice. It’s play along or get locked up.”
The memory of Mark’s hand on my hip, his lips on my temple, surged back. The possessive ease of it. The terrifying, unwelcome spark it had ignited somewhere in Sabrina’s nerve endings. I felt a phantom ache in my—her—nipples, the metal bars through them sensitive against the lace of the bra.
“How?” The word was a plea.
“You’re a smart guy. You observed us for years, right? You watched me. So act like me. Be a little drunk, a little loud, hang on his arm.” She leaned in, my familiar face inches from Sabrina’s unfamiliar one. “I’ll be you. Quiet. Stick to the edges. Nod a lot. We’ll get home, separate, and then we… I don’t know. We research. We figure this out.”
The logistics were a nightmare. My life, my marriage, hinging on this twenty-two-year-old’s performance. Her life, her new marriage, in my clumsy, introverted hands.
“What about… the details?” I asked, my face flushing with a heat I could feel in my cheeks. “I don’t know how to be you. I don’t know your… routines.”
A slow, grim smile spread across my own face. It was a terrifying expression to witness. “You’ll learn fast. Just follow Mark’s lead. And for god’s sake, if he wants to fuck, you have a headache. A migraine. The world’s worst period. Anything.”
The crude wording, in my voice, made me physically recoil. The motion made everything sway again.
“Okay,” I breathed, the sound barely audible over the generator’s growl. “Okay. We pretend.”
“We survive,” she corrected. She straightened up, adopting my slouch, my hesitant posture. It was a chilling transformation. “Meet back here in fifteen minutes if you’re going to panic. Otherwise, see you at the cars later.”
She turned, my body moving with a deliberate, subdued gait back toward the lights and the noise. I was left alone in the grimy semi-darkness, in a body that felt like a poorly fitted, hyper-sensitive suit. The piercings—the nose ring, the dozen in my ears, the ones in places I couldn’t bring myself to think about—all felt like inserted shards of cold evidence. The tattoos were a second, indelible skin I hadn’t chosen.
I had to go back. I had to find Mark and let him put his hands on me. I had to be Sabrina.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath that lifted the weight on my chest, I turned and began the unsteady walk back into the chaos, each step a betrayal of everything I knew.